Philosophy as Poetry

James and Dewey asked us to give up the goal of achieving correspondence with the way things intrinsically are, and to settle for that of leading richer human lives.

So in a post-Platonic culture, the love of wisdom would revert to its older sense of “intellectual culture.”

Perhaps the best way to wrap up what I have been saying in these lectures is to turn to the question, What would intellectual life be like if the Platonic search for ahistorical criteria came to seem as quaint as the worship of the Olympian deities? If retail ideals were the only ones thought worthy of discussion? If human finitude, and the priority of the imagination to reason, were taken for granted? If romanticism and pragmatism had both come to seem simple common sense? If the jigsaw puzzle view of things had come to seem as implausible as the notion of divine providence?
In the past I have sometimes described such a culture as one in which literature and the arts have replaced science and philosophy as sources of wisdom. But that description now seems to me misguided. I think it would be better to say that it would be a culture in which the meaning of the word “wisdom” had reverted to its pre-Platonic sense. Before the Greek word sophia acquired the special sense that Socrates and Plato gave it, it meant something like “skill,” something that could be gained only through the accumulation of experience. In that older sense, wisdom can be gained only by living a long time, seeing many men and cities, and keeping one’s eyes open. But after Socrates and Plato it was thought of differently; sophia came to mean getting in touch with something that was not the product of experience at all. The Greek word for “love of wisdom,” philosophia, which had once meant something like “intellectual culture,” came to denote the attempt to escape from finitude, to get in touch with the eternal, to achieve some sort of transcendence of the merely human.

we can combine Shelley’s ebullient praise of the imagination with Dewey’s sober insistence that moral and political progress will always require willingness to make dangerous experiments.

Where I differ from Habermas is that he thinks it important to see this practice as aiming at universal validity. In various exchanges between us, I have argued that universal validity is a notion that does not work. I do not see that it can be made relevant to practice. Whereas I am happy to admit that adopting a social-practice conception of rationality requires us to relativize what counts as “the better argument,” Habermas finds such relativization debilitating. But his insistence that the regulative ideal of universal validity can save us from relativism seems to me inconsistent with his own account of reason as communicative rather than subject centered. I cannot see how, given this account, he can still maintain what amounts to an immanent teleology, one that insures that sociopolitical freedom will insure the triumph of the better argument—“better” in a universalistic, unrelativized sense.
I see such an immanent teleology as the last vestige of the idea that history follows a script. On the view I put forward in my first lecture, imagination is not a candidate for the role of scriptwriter. It is neither a homunculus nor any other sort of agent. To say that imagination is prior to reason is just to say that somebody has to think up things to talk about, to envisage the outlines of a novel social practice, to walk as the prophecy of the next age, before progress can occur. The imagination is not a means of access to truth, but rather to novelty—novelty whose adoption may or may not be a good thing.

But if we are ever to break free of Platonic ways of thinking, we shall have to stop thinking of “reason,” “will,” “desire,” and “emotion” as names of homunculi, striving for control of the body in which they reside. We shall have to abjure the attempt to divide the soul into parts—and the sort of imagery that Plato uses in dialogues such as Phaedrus. Such imagery encourages what Berlin calls “the apotheosis of the romantic will.” More generally, it facilitates a proliferation of what Jürgen Habermas has called “others to reason”—purported alternative sources of truth such as pure, unconceptualized, prelinguistic experience, or unquestioning religious faith, or mystic rapture, or the mysterious source of insight that Heidegger called Denken. Because the philosophical tradition has led us to think of reason as a truth-tracking faculty, doubts about Platonism led post-romantic thinkers to nominate other faculties for this role.

This was the point that Dewey made when he spoke of “the means-end continuum.” It was a mistake, Dewey argued, to describe deliberation as choosing means to achieve fixed ends, because ends are constantly being reduced to means and means are constantly promoting themselves to the status of ends.

Heidegger has popularized an account of the shift from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Kant as a matter of putting selfhood in the place that substance occupied in Greek thought. Russell, in a passage I quoted yesterday, treats James and Dewey as arguing that the Self should be allowed to dominate the not-Self. But the subjective-objective distinction evaporates when the appearance-reality distinction does. This is because the subject is as much subject to redescription as is the object.

The search for stable ahistorical criteria for deciding between competing beliefs and competing desires is a product of the jigsaw puzzle view. If all the pieces of the puzzle are at hand, yet different puzzle solvers still disagree about how they are supposed to fit together, then it would seem that we need criteria for telling a real fit from an apparent fit.

Berlin says that Friedrich Schiller introduced, “for the first time in human thought,” the notion that “ideals are not to be discovered at all, but to be invented; not to be found but to be generated as art is generated.” As far as I know, none of the romantics went on to say that not only moral and political ideals but also the concepts of natural science and those of common sense were so generated.